For more than 27 years, My Morning Jacket have fully committed to their belief in music as a conduit for revelation of all kinds. Hailed by The New York Times as “the kings of expand-your-mind, religious=experience rock,” the Louisville, KY-bred five-piece has become one of the most acclaimed and beloved bands of their generation. Earning a reputation as having a dynamic, life-altering live experience, they have built a devout worldwide fanbase through sold-out headline tours, top-billed festival sets, and their highly anticipated annual vacation concert, One Big Holiday.
There’s a theory in physics — the idea that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, and that the passage of time itself is an illusion. It’s also the best way to understand An Eraser and a Maze, because you can hear every era of Modest Mouse coexisting at once on it. Past, present and future — none of it retreading the past, just existing simultaneously.
That’s probably no surprise given the creative ether from which it all springs. Isaac Brock’s process is beyond anyone’s grasp, including his own. He just gets out of the way. As he puts it, “The awake part of my brain isn’t even really involved. There’s an entire different factory in my head that does the good shit.” The result is a record that feels familiar and alien at once — warm, yet cold. Surprising, even confounding at points, in the best possible way.
Sonically, the album spans the full arc of the band’s catalog. “Absolutely Necessary Never” takes the DNA of “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” — and happens to be a new Modest Mouse classic. “Speak ‘N Spell (Or Not)” feels like a hybrid between early-era guitar work and the bombastic choruses of Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The stripped-down moments hit hardest: “Dogbed in Heaven/Give It a Skeleton” wouldn’t have felt out of place on Ugly Casanova’s Sharpen Your Teeth, while “Remember Yourself” finds Brock singing to a quiet fingerpicked guitar, raw and unguarded. “Third Side of the Moon,” meanwhile, is cold and stark, warm and human — somehow both at once.
The players themselves hail from various eras of the band. Late founding drummer Jeremiah Green appears in a sample, his presence haunting the record throughout — and not just sonically. Having lost several close people over the past few years, Brock had been thinking about mortality. The record’s liner notes detail a dedication to Green alongside others: Rob Laakso, Sam Jayne, Scott Kane, Sean Foley. As Brock said following Green’s death in late 2022, “I imagine there’s going to be a ghost in the house for quite a while.”
Modest Mouse began working on this collection immediately following The Golden Casket. Where that record was an attempt to manufacture post-pandemic silver linings, An Eraser and a Maze takes a different approach. “For this one, I just tried being real honest with myself,” Brock says. He hopes those who’ve experienced loss find something useful here — not something “glibly optimistic,” nor “this is my darkest hour.” Something harder to name.
An Eraser and a Maze might mark the end of a timeline, or the start of one, or maybe both at once. It feels familiar and warm, yet wholly alien in a cold world. And in a past, present, and future that often feel devoid of surprise and the brilliance of contradiction, thank god for Modest Mouse.
Spoon, Austin’s most esteemed rock ambassadors, have released ten albums to date including a string of five straight top 10 records: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007), Transference (2010), They Want My Soul (2014), Hot Thoughts (2017), and Lucifer on the Sofa (2022).
Lucifer on the Sofa earned the band its first-ever GRAMMY nomination (Best Rock Album) and was praised by Rolling Stone as “The best thing they’ve ever done.”
Hailed by TIME as “one of the greatest American rock bands”, Spoon topped Metacritic’s chart as the single most critically acclaimed band of the aughts.
In 2019, Spoon released Everything Hits At Once: The Best of Spoon, which was praised by NPR as a “convincing argument for Spoon being one of their era’s most distinctive and excellent rock bands.” That same year, Fender released the Britt Daniel Signature Telecaster Thinline as part of their artist signature electric guitar series – highlighting the enduring influence of Daniel’s precision-punk style that has helped fuel Spoon to become what the Guardian calls ‘one of the finest bands of their generation.’
After more than a decade of music-making, Durand Jones & The Indications have blossomed as a unit and are basking in their successes. On their aptly titled new album, Flowers, The Indications unfurl their true colors – embracing all their roots and influences, maturation and confidence, and share them with the world.
Can a self-portrait be a collage? Can empathy be autobiographical? What’s the point of living if we’re not trying to understand all the horror and humor that surrounds everything? These are a few of the questions lurking under the bleachers of Wednesday’s new album Bleeds, an intoxicating collection of narrative-heavy Southern rock that—like many of the most arresting passages from the North Carolina band’s highlight reel so far—thoughtfully explores the vivid link between curiosity and confession.
Bleeds is not only the best Wednesday record—it’s also the most Wednesday record, a patchwork-style triumph of literary allusions and outlaw grit, of place-based poetry and hair-raising noise. Karly Hartzman—founder, frontwoman, and primary lyricist—credits Wednesday’s tightened grasp on their own identity to time spent collaborating on previous albums, plus a tour schedule that’s been both rewarding and relentless. “Bleeds is the spiritual successor to Rat Saw God, and I think the quintessential ‘Wednesday Creek Rock’ album,” Hartzman said, articulating satisfaction with the ways her band has sharpened its trademark sound, how they’ve refined the formula that makes them one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,” she said. “We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel like we did.”
Just like Rat Saw God, one of the defining rock & roll records of the 2020s so far, Bleeds came together at Drop of Sun in Asheville and was produced by Alex Farrar, who’s been recording the band since Twin Plagues. Hartzman again brought demos to the studio, where she and her bandmates—Xandy Chelmis (lap steel, pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums), Ethan Baechtold (bass, piano), and Jake “M.J.” Lenderman (guitar)—worked as a team to bulk-up the compositions with the exact right amounts of country truth-telling, indie-pop hooks, and noisy sludge. More than ever, the precise proportions were steered by the lyricism—not only its tone or subject matter, but also the actual sound of the words, as well as Hartzman’s masterfully subjective approach to detail selection. Whether she’s purging her fascination with a gruesome true-crime case (“Carolina Murder Suicide”) or recounting why her old landlord Gary got dentures at thirty-three (“Gary’s II”), every image or scene is filtered through Hartzman’s agile, writerly brain. The particulars deemed essential—a wincing dentist, a crooked nail, a Pitbull puppy pissing off a balcony—all contain revelations about Hartzman’s specific obsessions and vulnerabilities, about the fragmented way she processes the world. She confronts this affinity for interpersonal soul-searching on “Townies,” remembering a high-school mischief partner whose sexual adventures triggered nasty gossip: “Off I-40 / crawled into your life begging on my knees / and I get it now / you were sixteen and bored and drunk.” Maybe sometimes the best way to locate truth or pain or dignity within your own life story, Bleeds suggests, is by crawling into someone else’s.
Not long before the first Bleeds sessions, Hartzman and Jake Lenderman ended the romantic part of their relationship. Worried about disrupting the group’s hard-earned synergy, the pair hid this development from the rest of Wednesday until the album was done. Written entirely pre-breakup, the songs on Bleeds were already grappling with grief and memory and the hidden elegance of the profane; the extent to which this compartmentalized heartache leaked into the final recordings is right now unknowable, and might always be. One thing that is indisputable, however: Even without considering its prescient overtones, the doomed romance of “The Way Love Goes” would’ve stung like an open wound; Hartzman’s literal, doubt-filled poetry is delivered languidly over soft-focus finger plucks and Chelmis’s mournful steel.
Hartzman’s distinct singing voice and its connection to her storytelling has always been at the heart of Wednesday, and she stretches that instrument with remarkable flexibility across Bleeds: Her vocal has never sounded sweeter than it does when she’s sentimentalizing pickled eggs on the twangy and timeless-feeling “Elderberry Wine,” and it’s never sounded more corrosive than on “Wasp,” a late-album sucker punch which has been rattling Wednesday crowds since the band started performing it out last year. Hartzman full-on screams through the latter’s eighty-six-second runtime, her figurative language distilled to its bleakest and most concise form: “My life is a spider web / built into the doorway / When you walk in you duck your head / and the wind is always blowing.”
Hartzman’s not concerned with bettering her voice in a formal sense, with trying to make it sound “good” against any conventional standards. Even now, as Wednesday’s visceral music reaches more and more ears beyond the mountains of western North Carolina, Hartzman’s focus remains challenging herself: reaching for a note she can’t quite hit, uncovering new textures while shrieking over thick layers of melody and muck. She wants to keep trying things, and to keep archiving evidence of that trying. At the end of “Wound Up Here,” while she’s sing-screaming the titular refrain, which interpolates a line of writing by the Appalachian poet Evan Gray, Hartzman’s voice breaks a little. “I love that part—it shows that there’s a place to go with the next album,” she said. “It’s like a cliffhanger.”
Bleeds is a reminder that Hartzman and her bandmates are exclusively interested in chasing glory through games they invent themselves—games with rulebooks you can only decipher late at night, in that freaky and perfect place between sleep and awake where you’re not sure if you’re dreaming or remembering something that already happened. In this arena of their imagination, the scoreboard’s a neon bar sign, the commentator’s a cicada, the mascot is an eighty-year-old Pepsi addict with no teeth. Wednesday is always World Champion, and the award hanging from Karly Hartzman’s neck isn’t an Olympic gold but rather a heart-shaped pendant—a clunky, rust-stained heirloom with countless funny and fucked-up stories locked safely inside.
The Los Angeles League of Musicians, LA LOM, are an instrumental trio formed in Los Angeles in 2021. They blend the sounds of Cumbia Sonidera, 60’s soul ballads and classic romantic boleros that emanate from radios, backyard parties and dance clubs of Los Angeles with the twang of Peruvian Chicha and Bakersfield Country.
Bonny Light Horseman’s new album, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. Confident and generous, it is an unvarnished offering that puts every feeling and supposed flaw out in the open. The themes are stacked high and staked even higher: love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time all permeate Bonny Light Horseman’s most vulnerable and bounteous offering to date. Yet for all of its humanistic touchpoints, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free was forged from a kind of unexplainable magic.
Written over five months in 2023, this third album began when the band’s core trio–Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman–convened in an Irish pub alongside beloved collaborators JT Bates (drums), Cameron Ralston (bass), and recording engineer Bella Blasko. Mitchell suggested the pub as their first recording location, based on her one conversation with owner Joe O’Leary. She had a feeling about the place, and was surprised by her bandmates’ enthusiasm for the idea. Stepping inside the pub’s aged confines, the trio felt an immediate connection to its palpable sense of community, and of family, forged over many decades.
The pub was Levis (pronounced: “leh-viss”) Corner House, a century-old watering hole in Ballydehob, a tiny coastal village in County Cork, and its energy became a singular source of Bonny Light Horseman’s creative engine. The pub’s upright piano, which they lubricated with olive oil to quiet its creaking, became a sort of spiritual fulcrum, a single entity that embodied all of the album’s motifs: imperfection as a badge of honor; aging, endurance and the passage of time; how the simplest of acts can heal us. The analogs–between this century-old meeting place of local folk and this trio of American folkies–were undeniable. “It has this sense of history; it’s also small, and crammed with a bunch of stuff that’s spilling all over the place,” says Kaufman. “It was like the pub version of our band.” A painting that hung on a wall of the pub, which watched over the band during their time working, became the album cover. “I was making eye contact with that person for most of the recording,” Johnson said of the artwork. And there was a deeper connection. Before the band had even planned to record in the pub, the owner’s wife had named the woman in the painting Bonnie.
There’s magic in a place like Levis Corner House, yes, but it takes the right wizards to wield it. At the center of Bonny Light Horseman is, always, the singular combination of three powerful and tender artists–artists who expertly dodge superlatives but are quick to acknowledge the ways they strengthen and enrich one another, and the bond that makes each one better, braver and more vulnerable than they’d be on their own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the force of their voices together, which work with complete trust in one another through the gentlest moments and the most ruthless wails. The result can comfort and cradle listeners, but also leaves them rattled, wrecked, and reborn.
On a practical level, the “blessed mess” of Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free shows up in its fidelity to this home, as crowd noise, laughter, coughing, and field recordings (“Think of the royalties, lads!”) convey everything from this special place in time. But philosophically, the “mess” is evidence of something deeper. It’s the imperfect, soul-nourishing fruit born of a singular communal experience, one that transforms its participants through the spirit of good company. Mitchell posits the idea of a “feast” and how dinners with friends effortlessly span courses, conversations, and hours — a meal that’s nutritious on physical and spiritual levels. “I have a friend who says you should never remove the dishes from the table, that you should sit among the wreckage,” she offers.
“There was this new level of letting it all hang out,” Mitchell said of the album’s making. In its evolution from recording to release, this meant compiling a double LP—eighteen songs across two discs. It also meant two titles, if not precisely two distinct records. Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free is sprawling and welcoming, and encompasses the group’s captivating artistic layers: its roots in the sounds and lyrical spirit of traditional folk music, its branches in a more experimental and emotionally raw version of the band.
The group tracked about half of the songs in the main room of Levis’s. They spent two days working alone. On the evening of the third, O’Leary invited some enthusiastic residents to join in. That’s not to say it’s a live album; instead, the third day of the Ireland sessions represented a serendipitous blend of energies because the audience implicitly understood the assignment. Patrons gave the band enough space to talk about arrangements and record multiple versions of songs, but they also provided an evident sense of environmental joy as they chatted over pints with friends and family. “We were doing this in the middle of their spot and they intuitively understood what was required of them,” Johnson said. “It was pretty magic.”
The band then returned to their spiritual home, upstate New York’s Dreamland Recording Studios (where they completed their first two albums), to finish the work they had started. Frequent collaborator Mike Lewis joined on bass and tenor saxophone. Annie Nero stopped by to play upright bass and sing some harmonies for an afternoon. The days were rhapsodic and restorative, filled with crying, and songs that poured out like tears.
The poignant quandary at the center of “I Know You Know” revealed itself in mere minutes. The trio attributes the speed to the fact that they’d already finished much of Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free and were able to “stand on the shoulders” of that creativity. It’s also demonstrative of the band’s ability to lace emotional devastation with a pop sensibility, which they’ve achieved throughout the album. Its feel-good, mandolin-laced arrangement and anthemic chorus belie how its refrain will wreck you. “I’m a fool if I love you and a fool if I let you go,” Johnson sings as Mitchell’s voice soars alongside him.
“Tumblin Down” is similar in its melodic tribulation. A folk-rock portrayal of an unraveling relationship, it’s like the spirit of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” set to song—light on its surface but woven from existential crisis. “When I Was Younger,” meanwhile, is a primal scream, revolutionary for its open reckoning with motherhood, maturation and all of the things polite society doesn’t say out loud. In the song, Mitchell and Johnson’s honeyed voices meet and transform into a two-headed beast formed from pent-up emotion; its roar is necessary, beautiful, and scary.
“Old Dutch” originated as a voice memo recorded in a historical church of the same name in Kaufman’s home city. “It was timestamped ‘Old Dutch’ and that was too perfect; it sounded like a Bonny Light Horseman song,” he said. Its choral refrain echoes those origins; it also punctuates the band’s tale of shifting love with that alluring thing the heart is inevitably steered by—a lingering, often illogical, feeling.
With Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, Bonny Light Horseman offers a distinct sense of grace, and a reminder that life is most lived when things aren’t so perfect. Over the years, the band has accumulated many miles on the collective odometer of life. That’s all reflected here, in these modern folk songs, laced with glory and chaos. As Mitchell puts it: “It’s not concise. It’s not simple. It’s messy, and that’s OK.”
Kevin Morby is a Kansas City based singer/songwriter. With his eight acclaimed solo albums and myriad records of various collaborations, Morby has become a true musical auteur. His singular vision, evocative lyrics, and aptitude for catchy, dense songwriting has placed him firmly among the ranks of modern icons. Each Morby record possesses its own unique persona and explores intriguing themes and fertile terrain through shifting, focused textures and dexterous, dedicated skill. Little Wide Open, Morby’s latest album produced by Aaron Dessner, possesses a newfound confidence and clarity in both Morby’s writing and Dessner’s production that recalls Tom Petty’s 1994 classic Wildflowers.
When the members of Slow Pulp discuss Yard, their second full-length record and first for ANTI-, their vocabulary often defaults to synesthetic imagery and sensation.
“We have so many visual cues for how we talk about music,” singer and guitarist Emily Massey says as she stops herself in the middle of explaining how the album’s second song, “Doubt,” sounds like wakeboarding. “Doubt is quite dark lyrically, but it is found in this upbeat and almost campy environment.”
On Yard, the Wisconsin-bred, Chicago-based four-piece nestles comfortably into pockets of nuance, impressions, contradictions—sonics and lyrics finessed together to bottle the specific tension of a feeling you’ve never quite been able to find the right words for. In that regard, listening to Slow Pulp can feel like being in a room with someone who’s known you so long that they can read your every micro-expression and pinpoint exactly how you’re feeling before you can. Perhaps this spawns from the band’s own shared history and chemistry; in various ways, the four of them grew up—are still growing up—together.
Guitarist Henry Stoehr and drummer Teddy Mathews attended elementary school together in Madison. Not long after, they met bassist Alex Leeds at the west side location of the now-closed local music program called Good’nLoud Music. And while Massey didn’t enter the fold until later on in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Mathews and Stoehr, it turns out she was in the same program on the other side of town at Good’nLoud’s east side location. In fact, the chords to Yard’s addictive track “Slugs” are from a song Stoehr wrote for his crush in the sixth grade. “Imagination,” Mathews immediately chimes in with the name of Stoehr’s original. The album’s iteration of the song is, fittingly, also about a crush: “You’re a summer hit, I’m singing it,” Massey swoons over a warm wave of guitar fuzz and syrupy background vocals.
With Leeds attending college in Minneapolis and the other members in Madison, the quartet started recording, playing shows around the Midwest, and eventually released their first EP as a four-piece, EP2, in 2017. It’s an intimate, restless, and decidedly lo-fi 17-minute debut by a band with an obvious knack for creating sticky hooks that tend to stay in the space behind your eyes long after the songs are finished playing. So obvious that, without much promotion on the band’s end, EP2 picked up traction across YouTube channels and blogs, and thanks to the power of the internet, Slow Pulp unexpectedly found themselves amid their first wave of buzz.
In September 2018, the band relocated to Chicago and moved in together, writing and recording most of their Big Day EP at a cabin in Michigan the following January. As they put in the hours on stage and in the studio, the buzz continued to grow, they kept refining their work, and by 2019, they were touring with Alex G and working on their debut full-length record, Moveys.
There’s nothing more resonant than the human voice. It contains timbres and textures no other instrument can replicate, but most importantly, it’s immensely powerful: One voice can spark an uprising, but many voices in unison create a movement. Nya Gazelle Brown, Sabrina Cunningham, and Piya Malik, the three women who front NYC punk-chic, discodelic band Say She She, understand how to wield such power. They soar above irresistible grooves, locking together in gorgeous three-part harmonies that cleverly disguise the feeling of righteous rebellion permeating their music. Theirs is a multi-pronged call to action: Move your body, expand your mind, and recognize your strength.
Say She She, whose name pays homage to Nile Rodgers, made Cut & Rewind, their third record, almost immediately after wrapping the tours supporting 2023’s Silver. The band’s trajectory has skyrocketed over the past few years, earning praise from The Guardian, the LA Times, MOJO, and NPR, and touring with Thee Sacred Souls. They have performed at venues like the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and the Roundhouse in London, as well as festivals including Glastonbury, Austin City Limits, and Pickathon. They’ve long mined the sounds of the ’70s and ’80s, citing Minnie Riperton, Rotary Connection, Liquid Liquid, and ESG as influences. Cut & Rewind expands their scope, incorporating elements of Lonnie Liston Smith and the Lijadu Sisters into their sonic palette while channeling the spirit of contemporaries like Lambrini Girls and Amyl and the Sniffers. It all combines into a psychedelic soundscape of pulsing disco beats, astral whistle tones, and earwormy melodies.
Over a couple of short, intense sessions, Brown, Cunningham, and Malik gathered with their rhythm section, Dan Hastie, Sam Halterman, Dale Jennings, and Sergio Rios—all members of cult funk band Orgone—at Rios’s North Hollywood studio, Killion Sound. Say She She’s writing practice is an exercise in presence, as each of the three channels their front-of-mind thoughts and feelings into cathartic transmissions. There’s an element of spontaneity at play, informed by the players’ affinity for The Meters-style jamming and the studio discipline of Booker T and The M.G.’s, as well as Malik’s time in a post-punk improv band with Liquid Liquid’s Sal Principato. “The writing room is very free,” says Brown. “We’re able to just be, and fully express ourselves.” They’d write a song and record it that day, cutting the instrumental to tape no more than three times, choosing their favorite take, and immediately laying vocals. To preserve that raw, spur-of-the-moment vibe, they stick to a hard and fast rule: “We never record anything that we can’t recreate live,” explains Malik. “It’s the same thing when the three of us are up on stage that happens in the studio.”
Each of the 12 tracks on Cut & Rewind crackles with palpable energy, practically daring you to keep your head and hips still. The cosmic boogie of “Chapters” ripples out into the ether, while the no-wave throb of “Shop Boy” glides like rollerskates through a warehouse loft. The silky “Under the Sun,” written in solidarity with the 2023 Writers Guild of America strikes, shines like a sun flare in a camera lens. The three vocalists deftly weave around each other, sometimes creating an interlocking rhythmic lattice (part of a technique they’ve dubbed the “Say She She sigh”), sometimes coalescing in a heavenly triad. But a politically charged undercurrent buzzes beneath the lush, strobing sonics, giving these jams an added heft. In a time of political turmoil where community is more necessary than ever, Say She She offers a particular salve: protest music dressed up as a sweat-dripping, body-moving, consciousness-raising good time.
“She Who Dares” is a simmering slice of psych-funk that imagines a near-future dystopia wherein women’s rights have been decimated globally. The group started writing the piece as a way to exorcize a notably insulting male interaction, but it morphed into a more universal, fist-raised anthem. It starts with Cunningham’s voice filtered through a megaphone, explaining how hundreds of thousands of women have suddenly been imprisoned across the world. “It feels scary, setting a Handmaid’s Tale tone,” explains Cunningham, “but ultimately, it’s meant to be empowering for other women.” The song doesn’t linger in fear; instead, it seizes and becomes that megaphone, issuing a chant of encouragement to keep up the good fight.
Early album highlight “Disco Life,” whose unbreakable beat and shimmying tambourine live up to the name, is one of Cut & Rewind’s most overtly political cuts. It examines the 1979 “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Stadium in Chicago, a publicity event-turned-riot organized by shock jock Steve Dahl. Attendees were encouraged to bring a disco record in exchange for cheap admission, which Dahl would then burn in a dumpster—already an implicit attack on a genre fronted by Black people, queer people, and women—but the crowd brought and destroyed anything made by Black musicians. The lyrics decry the event’s racism and homophobia, understanding that the roots of the riot still linger. Say She She knows a better world is possible, and uses “Disco Life” to manifest “a playing field where all are free.”
Cut & Rewind is Say She She at their most vital, both outside of time and profoundly of the now. It urges us to stay present and attentive to the challenges we must endure, but offers a way to recharge our collective battery. It’s a shimmering, celebratory epic, equally suited for the dancefloor and the demonstration.
Montreal natives Dave 1 and P-Thugg have turned their childhood friendship into a 20-year musical career, launching them from Montreal basements to main stages worldwide. Through six critically acclaimed studio albums, Chromeo are credited for pioneering the 80s-tinged electrofunk sound that permeates radio airwaves today. Known for their analog synths, infectious hooks and iconic visuals, Chromeo are also a relentless live act: 2023 marked their fifth performance at Coachella (they’ve also played Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo four times) and 2024 capped a 150-date touring cycle for their latest release, Adult Contemporary. Last Fall, the duo returned to their roots and performed their seminal record Fancy Footwork front to back for six sold-out nights. Expect new music from the Funklordz this year, and for years to come.
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